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Abracadabra! (We just destroyed capitalism)

humanitarian intervention

Solid Dick

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NOTE: This article has been amended to correct factual mistakes and clarify arguments.

 

Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jnr. and directed by Jon Favreau, is objectively one of the most evil films ever made. Possibly the most evil, actually.

 

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I’ll get around to justifying that opening statement in a bit. But first, I just want to say… ahem… fuck Tony Stark. Seriously, fuck him. The arrogant, smug, privileged, sexist, immature, selfish, capitalist prick. The rich, preening, self-satisfied asshole. The callous, self-involved, vainglorious, narcissistic wanker. This guy isn’t charming or funny or lovable. He’s scum, masquerading as humankind’s best friend. He’s the 1% as saviour of the world, at a time when the 1% are directly and knowing destroying the world. He’s the smiling face of the anthropocene (or rather capitalocene) extinction. He’s genocidal imperialism as (lone) humanitarian intervention. He’s neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign policy as a series of bad-boy quips. He’s private capitalist industry as heroism. He’s mega-wealth as heroism. He’s white male privilege as heroism. He’s militarism, imperialism and American exceptionalism as heroism. He’s the War on Terror as heroism. He’s everything sick and twisted and rotten and filthy and evil and insane and false about our world, presented to us as aspirational role-model. He’s Donald Trump in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask… no, scratch that… Robert Downey Jnr. is a rich, reactionary dick too, isn’t he… so we might as well say that Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jnr. in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask. In any case, Tony Stark is everything we need to tear down, ruthlessly demolish, trample on and bury, presented to us as the best of humanity.

 

There’s no secret about this, of course. I’m not expecting any awards for searing, original insight. Everybody knows who and what Tony Stark is. He is, quite literally, stark. The films themselves make no secret about any of this. On the contrary, they loudly and proudly boast of it.

 

This stuff is baked into the character. It’s part of him by design.

 

I don’t pretend to know much about the Iron Man comics, original or contemporary. Generally speaking, I’m not a comics guy. I intend no disparagement of comics; they’re just not my can of Tizer, on the whole. So I come to these Marvel Cinematic Universe films (as I come to most films adapted from comics) as someone with little knowledge of the source material. But I’m not going to apologize for that, or seek to remedy it, for several reasons:

 

a) I can’t be bothered,

 

b) I don’t think it’s necessary, since the comics cannot possibly fundamentally alter the meaning of the films that stem from them, and

 

c) the vast majority of the audience – target and actual – are, like me, coming to these films without knowledge of the comics.

 

Having said that, I was told – by Holly B., during Shabcast 9, in which we chat about Iron Man, amongst other things – that Stan Lee’s original goal with Iron Man was to create a hero whom the hippies would hate but also be unable not to love.…

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Once More With Feeling?

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It is incredibly depressing to realise that I have been asking the rulers of the state I live in to refrain from bombing Iraq for my entire fucking life.

There’s an extent to which the ‘it won’t work’ critique is entirely valid as an objection to waging yet more war upon the Middle East.  Because the surface aim of the politicians is almost certainly to impose ‘stability’ on ‘the region’.  They like stability.  No threats to embarass them, no revolts to topple their friendly dictators, no threat to Israel, no danger to neoliberal exploitation of local resources and markets, etc.  And, as has been shown, it doesn’t work.  They try and try to bomb the Middle East into passive compliance, and all they succeed in doing is generating more troubles for their empire.

This is, of course, what empires have always done.  Create the problems of tomorrow by viciously conquering the problems of today.

But there’s another sense in which the ‘it won’t work’ argument is fatally flawed, because there’s a sense in which it does work.  It may never achieve ‘stability’ but it does keep the machinery of empire chugging, and the fuel of empire flowing.  Because the fuel of empire is as much war itself as the resources extracted via war.  The neverending war keeps the military-industrial complex in work, the contracts coming, the factories producing, etc.  It keeps the corporate media busy and happy, reporting yet more incomprehensible strife from ‘over there’ and ‘our’ attempts to make things better.  It keeps the endless circular debate about intervention circling (the system can tolerate a tortuous and muddled debate, what it doesn’t want is clarity).  It keeps the public money flowing into the vast state run apparatus of military spending, and into all the R&D that is done under the aegis of this and then handed over (free) to private enterprise.  It keeps the empire’s power and prestige in the ascendant, with the machinery of death inspiring the fear – and projecting the apparent invincibility – that every empire needs.

No, the war never ‘works’ in the sense of achieving a stable imperium, but it does ‘work’ – at least in the short term – in achieving a powerful empire.  One of the paradoxes of empire is that its power relies upon it never being stable.  So even when the bombing doesn’t work, it actually does.

Meanwhile, of course, people die.  And die and die and die.…

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Force Decides

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Israel is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza.  As they do from time to time.  To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.  Though even that is too kind to them.  As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the Israelis don’t want peace.  Give them everything they’ve ever wanted, and it still isn’t enough – because what they say they want isn’t what they want.  What they really want is to continue the war until they have finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and eradicated the Palestinians.  The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and becoming more openly so by the day.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it’s become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn’t do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious – that ‘what happened’ to the Native Americans was terrible – doesn’t seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you’re talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it – rightly – in the context of the Native American’s fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people – the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted – with a sigh and a tear – by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes ‘we’ are even allowed to be the baddies – as long as it was a long time ago, and we’re all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.…

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“I know it sounds mad,” says Martha, “but when the Doctor became human, he took the alien part of himself and he stored it inside the watch. It’s not really a watch, it just looks like a watch.”

“And ‘alien’ means ‘not from abroad’, I take it,” enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.

“The man you call John Smith… he was born on another world.”

“A different species.”

“Yeah.”

Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she’s not having any of this nonsense.

“Then tell me,” she presses, “in this fairy tale, who are you?”

“Just a friend. I’m not… I mean, you haven’t got a rival, as much as I might… Just his friend.”

“And human, I take it?”

She humouring the deranged girl.  As John said earlier, it must be culture shock.  Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher… an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.

“Human,” confirms Martha, “Don’t worry. And more than that: I just don’t follow him around. I’m training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine.”

This is too much.  Aliens… that’s one thing.  But this?  Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation.  This is more than just silly, this is… indecent.

“Well that certainly is nonsense,” she snaps, “Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour.”

Martha stops.

“Oh, do you think?”  She holds up her hand.  “Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row….” she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, “Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal.”

She is as irritated as Joan.  The two face each other across a chasm.

“You read that in a book,” says Joan weakly.

“Yes,” snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, “to pass my exams!”

I have issues with this story.  There’s the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start.  Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire.  The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England.  Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something).  It shows most directly in the Doctor’s donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as ‘respect for the fallen’ and ‘help for heroes’ and all that dishonest guff.  It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he’s on the right side, the side of assumptions that ‘we’ supposedly all agree on. …

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Enlightenment and Persuasion have walked in on the Doctor and his friends.  They now look human.  A man and a woman, created from a sketch Tegan drew.  Pale, impassive, handsome, impeccably-groomed people in clothes that Tegan thought fashionable.  They look like she modelled them on First Class passengers on Concorde.  The Jet Set. 

Persuasion hands round drinks.  Nothing more persuasive than that.

Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess.  She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.

“We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe,” she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.

She was kissed by technology.

“The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear,” says Persuasion suavely.  Yes, that’s always how the ‘natives’ look to the ‘explorers’.  Fearful little things.  “When last we were there, our reception was hostile.”

Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of ‘natives’ by ‘explorers’, is not fooled.

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” she sneers.

“Well, we must read your history books,” says the Doctor.  There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books.  You can read a lot between the lines.

“You will be welcome to do so,” says Enlightenment, “but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages.”

There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.

“One couldn’t wish for a more enchanting teacher,” says the Doctor.  He almost seems to be flirting with her.

“A very elevated one,” adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.

“Enlightenment,” says the Doctor.

“Minister of Enlightenment,” Persuasion corrects him.  Just so you know where you stand.

“Yes, of course,” replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, “And you must be Minister of Persuasion.”

Of course, every ‘civilised’ nation that ever set about conquering the ‘primitives’ always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their ‘advancement’, always said they were helping the child-races to grow… or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.

And such ‘civilised’ nations always aimed for ‘hearts and minds’, always brought their greater ‘wisdom’ with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved. 

And they always needed – need – their Ministers of Enlightenment.  And Persuasion.…

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Humanitarian Intervention

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Okay, so there’s a house.  Inside, an abusive husband is in the process of beating up his wife and kids.

“We’ve got to do something” says a concerned passer-by outside.

“I agree,” says a liberal onlooker.

“Right,” says the concerned passer-by, “wait here a mo…”

The concerned passer-by reappears in a suspiciously short amount of time with a fleet of bulldozers armed with wrecking balls, some petrol in a jerry can and a box of matches.  The bulldozers set about demolishing the house while the concerned passer-by sets light to it. 

Once all is quiet, the concerned passer-by and his mates raid the smoking ruins of the house for all the valuables that are still in one piece and unscorched, treading over the burned corpses of the wife and children as they go.  They strike a deal with the husband (it turns out they are old mates of his and actually sold him the knuckle-duster he was using to punch his wife).  In return for letting him live, he gives them his bank account details.  (He’s secretly quite pleased to be rid of the wife and kids.)

“Hmm,” says the liberal onlooker, “that didn’t go quite how I imagined.”

Two weeks later, the liberal onlooker is passing another house in which another abusive husband is beating up his wife and kids.

The same concerned passer-by as before appears next to him.

“We’ve got to do something,” says he.

“I agree,” says the liberal onlooker.

“Right,” says the concerned onlooker, “wait here a mo…”…

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And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to…

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This article – from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian – is really great.  It’s about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism… and all that kind of stuff.  Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty – all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes.  Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies… just in a way acceptable to liberals.

Here’s a snippet:

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal ‘humanitarian intervention’.  I’m all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn… but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too.  I can’t help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar).  See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.

Oh, by the way, here‘s blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the ‘nuanced’ Zero Dark Thirty.  Like this ‘nuanced’ response, for instance:

 Nothing like ‘nuance’ is there?

(Actually, I’ve blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama’s aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects – here.  Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity.  It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she’s not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)

Why do I care about movies and TV shows?  *Sigh*  Look, fiction matters.  In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people’s opinions (and I include myself in that).

Ayn Rand never proved anything as a ‘philosopher’, but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued.  Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.

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ADDITIONAL:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda

http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html

 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html

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YET MORE (27/01/13):

“This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.”…

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Bombs for Peace (Again)

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So, Western imperialist powers (especially the US and UK) spend years trying to undermine, attack and destabilise Gaddafi… presumably because his regime engaged in some nationalisation and brought some economic independence, not to mention his support for various “anti-imperialist” groups. The West indulges in occasional homicidal bombing raids that achieve nothing but the slaughter of innocents (including Gaddafi’s own baby daughter). 

(Don’t get me wrong, by the way – I’m no fan of the evil old bastard… though, if we’re doing body counts, he’s probably less blood stained than most leaders of the “free world”.) 

Then Gaddafi starts making grovelling offers to deactivate his own WMD programme… which the Western powers repeatedly ignore until they can paint it as a victory for the Bush/Blair moral crusade… 

As part of his new chumminess with Blair & Co., Gaddafi opens Libya up to foreign banks, foreign corporations and the IMF. As per the usual script, along comes structural adjustment, i.e. privatisation, austerity, etc. Gaddafi is announced as a reformed character now that his regime is becoming integrated into neoliberal globalisation. 

Then the Middle East ignites. The people of Tunisia and Egypt rise up and topple their dictators. The Libyans follow suit and launch a revolution that staggers in its bravery and bloody costliness. But, of course, it’s only a more dramatic and intense demonstration of the cruelty and brutality of the regime that the West now considers an ally. 

So what is the response of the political/ideological system that has been snuggling up to Gaddafi for several years? Why, use the Libyan people’s revolution as an excuse to dig up the rotting corpse of “humanitarian intervention” (a corpse that I hoped these new revolutions might bury forever) as a way of crowbarring US imperial influence into a process that needs it like mice need cats. 

So… we bomb the Libyan people when we don’t like Gaddafi (because he’s an evil terrorist, etc.), sell him weapons when we like him again (because he’s gonna let the IMF in), and then start talking about bombing the Libyan people (again) when they rise up to topple Gaddafi after we’ve cuddled him to our bosoms.

Irony overload. And bloody typical. And absolutely fucking outrageous.…

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